From Darkness to Light
by SingOff-Key
Summary: Despite all their cruelty, they do have a heart. It's like the sound on an old tape. The feelings are there- they're just turned down. What they need is guidance, so that they can tap into those lowered whispers, turn the volume back on.


_One day, I realized all the dumb, selfish things people do... it's not our fault. No one designed us. We're just an accident, Harold. We're just bad code. - Root, Person of Interest_

They both come to know the shadowy side of people at a very young age.

"You lost both your parents." Maddy says compassionately in a kind tone of voice.

"That's a- That's a polite way of putting it, ja." he admits sounding hurt to his core, grieving over their deaths ever since the day he lost them. "Mom was raped and shot and um... Dad was decapitated and hung from a hook in the barn." he describes how they were killed, remaining shockingly calm.

Maddy just stares at him.

"I was nine." he adds, tears making his blue eyes glow in the darkness of the night, as the pale light hits him from the side. He leans backwards, scrunches his eyes, then laughs. "Boo-hoo, right?" he asks almost sardonically.

Root- still Samantha Groves, back then- is twelve when, one night, she witnesses her best friend, Hanna, being kidnapped by a local man from outside the public library of Bishop, the small Texan town where she resides. She immediately rushes to alert the librarian who, having quite a romantic crush on the man, not only yells at Sam but also accuses her of outright lying. Sam makes a 911 call later that night, reporting the incident, but Hanna is never seen or heard from again.

Two years later, Sam avenges her beloved friend by setting the man who disappeared her up to be killed. That's when the cold-hearted assassin Root is born.

"What happened to you?" Harold questions her, feeling appalled by her beastliness, as he watches her torture Weeks, sitting in the armchair where Root has tightly tied him onto.

"Me?" She turns around surprised to face him. "You think I was damaged? Some childhood trauma?" she guesses what might have been his speculation. " I'm so sweet!" she chuckles bitterly, a sarcastic smile cracking on her face.

"Is it possible that you don't care how many people die because of the deals you do?" Maddy asks him as they are dancing to the beat of a hip-hop song.

"Look, people here kill each other as a way of life. It's always been like that." Archer replies cynically.

"So, you can just watch it and go about your day?" she asks again,but he leaves the question unanswered, snaps at her and walks away furiously.

"I don't enjoy killing people." Root assures him, leaning slightly forwards. "But,..." she adds, opening the little bottle with the pills which she's stolen from the pharmacy earlier. "I don't feel very bad about it, either." she finishes her sentence, while turning one of the pills into white dust.

"Yeah, it's a terrible, terrible world,..." Maddy admits, after she's followed him to the bar counter. "... but you know what? Good things are done every day; just -apparently- not by you." And she doesn't waste her time with this hard case any longer. Well, at least not for now.

"Clearly,..." points Harold on hearing she's brought him and Weeks to the cottage to observe the bad nature of people. "...we differ in our views of humanity."

However, despite all their cruelty, they do have a heart. It's like the sound on an old tape. The feelings are there- they're just turned down. What they need is guidance, so that they can tap into those lowered whispers, turn the volume back on.

Even so, a change of course won't occur naturally. A lot of hard work and effort will be needed on both Root and Danny's side and Harold and Maddy's. Sometimes, trying to teach them proves to be simply disappointing- if not frustrating.

"You're using him."Maddy chuckles, even though he's making quite an effort to persuade her he's actually trying to help Solomon.

On her saying that, Archer realizes there's no need for him to deny his true intentions anymore, so he turns outspokenly blunt.

"I'm using him..." he snaps without feeling in the least guilty."...and you are using me and this is how it works, isn't it?" he finally transforms the accusation into a brilliant rhetorical question.

"By your own definition,..." says Root in an emphatically low tone of voice, leaning close to him while standing beside his office, one hand on the desk. "...Cyrus is irrelevant."

"Everyone is relevant to someone." Harold repeats Nathan's words, absorbed in the most haunting of his thoughts.

"Do you know that Solomon thinks his son's gonna be a doctor one day?" Archer asks what appears like just for the sake of asking, staring without actually watching somewhere in front of him. He scoffs, half in pity and half in disgust. His haze focuses within a sec. "Maybe his baby dies in that camp, maybe his daughter gets raped." His shoulders lift slightly. "Who knows, maybe both." He looks right inside her accusatory green eyes, then narrows his own in an emphatic manner. "Do you realize that that diamond is the only chance he has of getting his family out of here..."

"You don't give a rat's ass..." Maddy cuts him off, angrily.

"Do you understand that?" he raises his tone of voice, surpassing hers.

"...about his family." she goes on, firing back.

Root walks over to Harold's glass board in frustration, pointing her index finger at Cyrus' picture and aggressively exposing her own way of thinking. "That man has spent every day of his life believing that there is actually some sort of higher plan." She chuckles, then continues, in an even more aggressive tone. "That's the problem with humans... they just sit around, hoping that someone will fix things. But, no one will. No one cares. The universe is infinite and chaotic and cold. And there has never been a plan." She pauses, before immediately clarifying. "At least, not till now."

"We fought and died together, you know? Black and white." Danny recalls with a vivid sparkle in his eyes. "Most people back home didn't even know we were at war!" Suddenly, a different tone colors his voice. "We thought we were fighting communism, but in the end..." Here some peculiar sort of resigned anger explodes a bit. "...it was all about who gets what, you know? Ivory, oil, gold, pfft..." He leans back, this style bringing an aura of indifference in him that unnerves her. "...diamonds." the word flies out his mouth. "So, one day I decided 'Leave it,' ya know?" He looks at her seriously, clenches his palm in a claiming fist and decisively brings it up to his chest. " 'I'm gonna get mine.' ."

"You gonna steal his diamond?" Maddy catches him off guard.

They both fall into silence. Maddy's piercing green eyes literally scan his impassive blue ones and sarcastically curled into a half-smile lips, trying to gauge a reaction.

"Hm." he scoffs, finally. "That diamond is my ticket out of this God forsaken continent."

"That doesn't answer the question." she presses, not too harshly though.

Root glances at Cyrus' photo with his friends and grabs it from the board, showing it to Harold.

"You wanna know what the plan was the day they died?" she asks and, slightly raising her upper lip to express disgust at people's pettiness, gives the answer too. "The plan was for someone to make 15 million dollars." She lowers her eyelids, accounting the story of how an executive at a big bank wanted them dead, so he wired the money to someone with the skills, resources and moral depravity to make that happen. She flutters her eyelashes again to look straight into his eyes. "And that someone was me." she reveals, grimacing and totally unashamed.

Harold is left in shock, trying to read something in her other than her denial to care for humans.

"Then I look around and I realize..." The grimace Archer makes is to express nothing but a feeling of repulsion and sickness in his stomach. "... God left this place a long time ago." He leans forward, all the emotion waking up in him. His voice cracks. "It's uh..." He loosely waves his hand in front of him, unable to appear ruthless and indifferent. "Ah, what's the point, huh?" He attempts to hide his eyes filled with water from Maddy by covering them with his hand. Maddy is quick to catch it in hers. His first reaction is to pull away but, as her grip on his hand tightens, he looks up and they stare into each other's eyes, Maddy holding his hand comfortingly.

Root chuckles, out of sheer frustration, trying to hold back the tears threatening to spill from her eyes, then shakes her head backwards. "And the punch line..." Tilting her head to the side, she reaches behind her ear, taking off her earpiece. "...is that your Machine keeps telling me to save Cyrus." She stares blankly right in front of her, holding the earpiece in her hand, then lets her stretched arm fall and slightly shakes her head to the side again, her voice emotional and unsteady. "How badly did you have to break it to make it care about people so much?"

"That didn't break it." Harold replies quietly. "It's what made it work. It was only after I taught the Machine that people mattered that it could begin to be able to help them." he explains, then adds hesitating a little: "I'd like to do the same thing for you, if you'd let me."

Root slowly turns her head to face him, for an instant giving him a kind look full of pain and unshed tears. Immediately afterwards, though, she shakes her head a bit to the side- a thick strand of hair nearly covering her left eye- ,closes her eyes, opens them again and eventually snaps at him, before leaving in a hurry to complete her mission.

In the end, she decides to save Cyrus rather than the chip.

Of course, their gradual transformation doesn't come painlessly. Soon enough, they reach a point- that point is called remorse- where they have to face their mistakes, all those horrible acts they've ever committed, and choose to do the right thing from now on.

"Sometimes I wonder,..." Danny lets Maddy in on his thoughts, after he's told her about the tragic loss of his parents. "...will God ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?"

"The life I've led, a good end would be a privilege." Root says in a low tone of voice, her eyelids lowered.

"It's not where you begin,..." Harold reminds her firmly. "... it's where you end up."

"Take it." Archer tells his partner, handing him the stone.

"Mr. Archer..." Solomon objects quietly, at a loss for words.

"Take it! Take it!" repeats Archer- more like ordering Solomon- while slowly but steadily drifting away to death.

"I thought you'd steal it from me..." is all Solomon can manage, dazzled by such a shift in Archer's personality.

"Ja, ja, it occurred to me, huh?" Archer chuckles painfully because of the gunshot wound.

Solomon returns his light laugh.

Afterwards, Archer gives him Maddy's card, instructing him to call her when they get to Conakry. Also, he advises Solomon not to trust that pilot for a second, giving him his handgun to point at the pilot's head if he messes around.

"I can carry you." insists Solomon, hating to leave his newfound friend behind.

"You take your boy home, huh." Archer refuses faintly, glancing at Dia, who's staring at Archer too. "You take him home."

"My value to the Machine is irrelevant!" Harold explodes, in a burst of both grief and anger.

"You're too important to me!" Root yells back, stepping forward, closer to him, and making an unexpected confession.

"The Machine didn't tell you to do this." Harold figures out, shocked at the realization.

"She told me not to." Root admits quietly.

Harold raises an eyebrow, then lowers his eyelids to the floor. Root chuckles briefly, trying to hold back the tears that sting her eyes, her voice breaking and shaky.

"I- I thought I- I could sacrifice everyone and I- I really did... Win some, lose some, right?... It's for a good cause... But- but, it turns out... I can't lose you, Harold."

Their sacrifice, they never think of it as such. Probably what they have in mind that particular moment is do whatever needs to be done. But, surely, they don't think of it as a way of atonement either. Initially, they're reluctant to even admit they're hurt- that is, until their breath becomes a heavy gasp, which is enough evidence in itself for Maddy and Harold to understand where their loved ones are headed towards.

A painful groan escapes him and the realization shakes Maddy to her core. For fractions of a second, she freezes- mind and body.

"You're hurt." she voices her thought, not quite hearing the words come out of her mouth. Her voice breaks a bit. "Are you hurt?"

"Ja, well, I've got a little problem here." is the only answer Archer gives her between ragged inhales.

"Are you hit?" Harold asks her in frantic panic, not missing she can barely support herself on the steering wheel.

"I'm fine, Harry." Root swallows hard and sits up a little. "I'm just fine." she repeats, attempting to fight the blinding pain that threatens to overtake her body. "Keep your eyes out. I need to drive." she draws in another labored breath, wheezing.

"I walked in darkness for a very long time until you guided me to light. And I wouldn't change any of it." Root has acknowledged to Harold only a few moments prior to getting shot.

"I'm really happy I met you, you know that?" Archer asks the journalist softly, close to affection.

"Yeah, I'm, um, I'm really happy I met you, too." he hears Maddy's cracked voice return the statement over the phone. "And I wish I could be there with you."

"That's a'right." Archer comforts her kindly. "I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."

"Then, why not choose one of the thousands as your voice? Why her?" Harold asks the Machine bitterly, not quite able to be hearing Root's voice so soon after losing her.

"Samantha Groves was special." the Machine explains the reason for that. "She was capable of terrible things,..." She adds "...but she chose to do good." She pauses, then clarifies- just like the way Root used to tease all the time. "Well, ever since she found you, at least."

The Machine's words regarding Root's choice remind Harold of what he had himself said to her once: "You're a brilliant woman, comrade and a friend."

Before entering the conference room, Solomon reads Maddy's article once again. Well, to be precise, he's not exactly reading but rather staring at Archer's black and white picture accompanying the text when he's told they're ready for him to address his speech. As he stands up to make his way to the conference room, he leaves the magazine open on the chair. As if Archer has never left.

While he's walking down the hall to address his speech, he glances at Maddy. She's smiling with her mouth closed, clapping her hands lightly. And he knows. He knows she's thinking exactly what _he's_ thinking: their friend should be here. To witness his one and very last good deed. Receiving his standing ovation, the only thing that's in Solomon's mind is to finish what Archer started.

_The term "bad code" applies to machines, not people. We have the ability to change, evolve. - Harold Finch, Person of Interest_


End file.
